I’m glad not to have had children, though it would be dishonest to attribute that sentiment to the state of the world around me. I was always too selfish, and truthfully, I found children tiresome even when I was a child myself—couldn’t even pretend with my little cousins that their shrieks of joy at some bright present amused me. Once, in the gap between the wars, when Meira and I were both staying at her house in Berlin, she turned on me mid-conversation, perceiving some slight in a comment I’d made about her and Franz’s struggle to bear children. A better brother would have remembered what he’d said, but my comment had immediately gone out of my head. I remember standing on the ornate rug in the entry of her home, hat on, gloves in hand, ready to head over to the university, wishing—while she railed at me—that she’d give me some indication of what I’d said. She refused. I think what I wanted then was not to soothe her, not to be forgiven, but to be able to assess whether it was she or I who was in the wrong. By the time I returned for dinner, she had fumed through my seven hours in class and at the library, fumed through Kant and Hegel and Horkheimer. Franz was late again, and though I sensed that the empty place at the head of the table annoyed her more than I did, I took the brunt of the anger. That’s when she said the thing she thought would hurt me most: ‘It’s your unborn child who’s lucky.’ Her chin quivered. ‘To have you as a father? I can’t imagine the disappointment.’

  If I had a son, he’d likely be Alejandro’s age. This softens me to Alejandro, but not sentimentally, only factually—a way, when other means have failed, to imagine some kinship between us. But I know that kinship is a cousin to fidelity: it is how we attach to others, to those whose countenance we bear, whose history informs us, whose view from the balcony mirrors our own. My father’s decisions, his travels and stories; my mother’s affirmations and her strangeness, her willingness to live in a country she was not born in—all of these have helped to bring me here, to this room in a hotel in Portbou. Why would I inflict my choices on a child, when the past, when the books and ideas that fill my present, have been everything? All these cries about the future! Until yesterday—until you, Pia—I could not even glimpse its trajectory.

  What could I write to explain these hours and days? Pia, you are like a dream one has, a harbinger. Like the box where I placed all the treasures of my childhood, except that my treasures now are merely things I’ve seen, and ideas, and strings of words. Still, I am placing them all in you.

  orning light slants through the storm’s heavy clouds. On the stretch of grass between the hotel patio and the thin wire fence of the promontory, two men in oilskin coats stand in the pelting rain looking through binoculars toward the sea. The taller of the two clasps his cap onto his head in the wind, his heavy coat flaps lifting.

  Pia’s room is cold, so she shrugs on a sweater—the only one she has, purchased this past spring after the barman drove her to the crofter’s shop, insisting she buy something to keep herself warm.

  The hotel sits above a large bay open to the ocean. Even when the days are mild, the wind crawls under a loose jacket, brings a chill. The village was built 150 years ago. When Pia thumbed through old photos at the local museum she could see how much of the bluff has eroded since then. Otherwise, the buildings are the same: rows of white stone houses with turn-of-the-century terraced archways, windows facing both the street and the horizon. Like every building in the chain along the ridge, the hotel now sits only a hundred metres from the cliff face.

  At her window, Pia watches as the men turn from the bluff toward the parking lot, one of them shouting to be heard above the wind.

  The builder is in the entryway putting on his coat when Pia steps off the stair landing into the hotel lobby. She’d expected him to come up to her room last night, but had fallen asleep almost as soon as she’d slipped under the covers—and in the morning, she’d woken up alone. He steps forward and says, ‘There’s wreckage on the beach.’ He repeats what has been relayed to him: A boat has gone down. Parts of it are washing up in the bay.

  Access to the bay below the hotel is past a ‘do not cross’ sign a short distance along the coast, where a trail to the beach zigzags through knee-high grasses and over the shelf of rocks that skirts the cliff. In the summer Pia would sometimes go down and sit on the sand with a book. It was usually quiet because the bay isn’t safe for swimming.

  The builder says he’s heading down to the shore, and Pia says, ‘I’ll come.’ He glances at her as if to ask, Why? A feeling flares in her chest, similar to the one she’d often experienced after first moving to the island—a response to the quick glances from locals that registered her as a foreigner; and to the middle-aged woman at the corner shop who treated her coldly even after Pia had been buying supplies there for weeks.

  ‘You’ll need a good coat,’ the builder says. And he walks out the door.

  Pia finds the prep cook’s coat again, still in the kitchen office, and borrows it. She pulls on her waterproof boots.

  From the top of the trail she counts six people—including the builder—hauling up debris from the shore. A dozen wood slats have washed onto the sand along with a large beam and its rigging. One of the men is carrying a bundle of fishing net. A dog—one of the island’s working breeds—trots along at his heels. Beyond the beach, the sea is heaving, and when it wells, slats of wood sometimes appear in the froth.

  The descent to the beach is tricky and Pia has to watch her feet. The long grass is blowing sideways and the rain makes everything slick. In the early summer she’d run down this trail, but now every step feels treacherous. It was in the summer—when Pia had been on the island only a month—that she thought she saw a fox. She’d been halfway down the slope with a book under her arm and a canister of tea in her hand. The fox appeared in the format of a flare of russet and the flick of a tail coursing through the stonecrop and spurrey before veering up the bank and over the grassy ledge. When Pia later told the barman what she’d seen, he had balked. There was a fox farm on the island a few decades ago, he told her, but a couple of the foxes had escaped their pens and killed some lambs, so they’d all been shot.

  ‘A dog,’ he said. ‘That’s what you saw.’

  But Pia knew better. Dogs on the island weren’t that shade of red.

  When she reaches the skirt of dark stone that marks the final drop to the beach, Pia stops. She recognizes everyone gathered here: the builder, the gentleman farmer she sometimes sees heading toward the fields with his herding dog, the widow’s son, the woman who works part-time at the post office, a local fisherman who’s in the bar every night at nine, and another local who brings his wife to the restaurant on special occasions…the two of them dressed up and enjoying the candlelight and black-tie servers. Seeing Pia, the dog trots toward her along the shoreline, his barks dragged off by the wind. Pia looks up at the wild sky. For the first time since she’s lived here, there are no birds to be seen.

  ONCE IN THE LATE SPRING, before the tourists arrived, the prep cook had taken Pia out on his motorcycle to show her the remote parts of the island. He’d been on the island for a year longer than she had been, but every time Pia asked him a question about the place, he’d shrug and say, ‘I have no idea.’ Midway through the ride they’d stopped to sit on the side of the road near an expanse of bog. The prep cook smoked and birds lifted up and flew down, flitting around them. Pia asked, ‘What’s this? What’s that?’ He couldn’t name a single thing. She put her hand around a clump of bushy-tipped grass and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Grass,’ he’d said, and shrugged.

  She pointed to a bird with a yellow beak who was staring at them from a nearby rock, eyes dark as nail heads.

  ‘Christ if I know.’

  ‘Some tour,’ Pia joked.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let me show you a shipwreck.’

  The so-called wreck was more like the bones of a ship, or like the jaw of an animal coming up through the sand. Up close, its rusted frame was slick with moss and seaweed. There was a thick chain along one of the girders and both it and the bolt holes on the nearby crossbeam had seaweed strung through their cavities. Pia knew a few of the local seaweeds from some of the chef’s dishes—but those were fresh and green or purple, and the seaweed banding the ship’s frame was brown and stringy. It made the wreck look as if it had feathers.

  The prep cook had brought along a camera and now he lifted it to his face. It was a bulky black and silver thing that he spent a lot of time adjusting. It occurred to Pia that maybe he was one of those people who could only see the world through mediums other than his own eyes. She asked what he was going to do with his photographs of the boat. ‘I just like the shapes,’ he explained, ‘how things can became abstracted into another form, but also how abstracted forms can cohere into something.’ His face, when he said this, relaxed into an expression of hopeful vulnerability, and Pia had felt a flash of tenderness toward him.

  ON THE BEACH, THE TWO MEN with the best raingear stand near the tideline. They step into the lather when slats of wood or sections of rigging come toward the shore. Pia and the postmistress—a blonde woman of Pia’s age, broad-shouldered and strong—drag the planks up the beach and put them in a pile. Pia has forgotten her gloves, and in between retrieving planks she rubs her hands together or bunches them under her sweater. The water is cold and the wind stings.

  The builder is out on the bluff with binoculars, scanning for survivors. One of the island’s biggest trawlers is due up from the south port to help with the search, but the port is thirty minutes away, and the sea past the rocks is still heaving. Among those gathered on the shore, there’s a sense of purpose: the widow’s son is relaying information to the hotel clerk, who’s on the radio back at the hotel; the fisherman is calmly inspecting the rigging and buoyed netting as it washes up. Pia has a sense that this has happened before—that the islanders know how the coming hours will unfold. Only the builder seems visibly upset. When, earlier, he’d rushed out of the hotel so quickly, Pia had suddenly thought: That isn’t the builder going down to the beach; it’s the doctor.

  There’s nothing else to drag up the beach, so Pia sits on a rock to rest. What had she expected to see? A ship listing in the bay? A gutted hull? Lifeboats? She remembers the last time she had a similar sensation—of turning a corner into an event that had already happened, when you expected something to be happening. It was, then, the difference between one breath and the next: I’m walking down the dim hall (I have a mother), I’m turning into the dank room the man has indicated (I have a mother), I look to where he points along the far side of the wall.

  THE BUILDER SPOTS THE FIRST LIFEJACKET, on the skirt of low rocks on the west side of the bay. The waves are too high for anyone to retrieve it, and soon Pia goes back to pulling wood planks out of the waves. Some of the planks have peeling blue paint on one side. There’s a bar of white pigment on another plank, thick like the stem of a letter. A moment later, another net comes bobbing in.

  As the rain eases up, the hotel clerk appears, wending her way down to the beach under an umbrella that dips sideways whenever she loses her footing.

  ‘It’s not one of ours,’ she says, when the group has assembled. ‘Everyone’s accounted for.’ So far there’s nothing to name the ship, no reports of missing vessels on the radio. The distress call had been a voice blanketed by static.

  The fisherman pushes back the hood on his jacket and squints at the scudded clouds. The lines around his eyes and mouth place him in his sixties—although Pia knows that island life can age people. ‘How far out is the trawler?’ he asks.

  ‘Should be here any time,’ the clerk says.

  Pia looks out toward the frothing waves. On the far side of the bay, just in her line of sight, the dog digs at something in the sand.

  An hour later, Pia jogs up to the hotel to get tea and sandwiches for the group on the beach. As she hangs the prep cook’s dripping coat on the peg inside the door, she overhears the bride’s father asking about the ferry. There’s the honeymoon flight from the mainland, he says, his wife’s appointment with a specialist, the unexpected cost of another night’s rooms. The hotel owner’s brother, who has come in to relieve the desk clerk, scratches his head and says, ‘They might run tomorrow. Depends on whether or not there’s damage to the port.’

  Most of the wedding party has gathered in the bar, where the staff is providing soup and salad. Light banter fills the room—Pia can hear the bride in a nearby booth, recounting a story that makes her bridesmaids laugh, little notes of pleasure bright as glass.

  The main kitchen is dark and quiet. Pia puts the kettle on and slices bread for a dozen sandwiches. She checks the temperature in the fridge, which is chugging along on half-power, and pulls out the cheese and meat she’d put under ice yesterday. Then she rummages in a crate for crisp lettuce. There’ll be no deliveries today, no restaurant service. The road between the hotel’s suppliers and the hotel—a rutted single track that cuts across the island’s midriff before dipping into a vale—is flooded; the phone lines are down. The chef isn’t a local but he’s been on the island five years, would understand the way a storm shifts priorities: livestock that need tending, damaged roofs.

  In the two wars that framed Pia’s childhood, people often went without. In the village by the sea there were food shortages and power outages. The fascia of the church—the calm faces and supplicating hands of the saints—were left to boulder the ground. Every Sunday, Pia’s neighbour, a woman in a grey coat and black square heels who was mother to four children under eight, took the wafer onto her tongue like a fledgling. Every week she became thinner.

  The oldest son of this woman was one of Pia’s only friends. The family lived in a two-storey house opposite the foot of the hill where Pia’s family lived. The boy was big-boned with a wide, easy smile and a loud staccato laugh. If Pia asked him a question—What games do you like? How many hens do you have?—he wouldn’t answer. But he was good at running and drawing, and once they became friends he’d greet Pia by raising both hands over his head and shouting her name.

  It was around this time that Pia’s father started taking her on regular morning walks. He said it was good to be out in the fresh air, but Pia sensed the walk was a demand of her mother’s: that her father get her out of the house, be more present in his daughter’s life. One day they climbed higher than usual, north from the village. After an hour or so, they came to a spot he seemed to recognize. ‘I want to tell you something,’ he said. They rounded a bend high above sea level and he pointed toward a dusty trail. ‘Thousands of people had to leave the country along that path.’ To their right, on the slope of the hill, the shell of a burned-out car rested against a rock, grass and weeds growing out of it, a gaping hole where a canvas roof had been. Two tires, which had rolled further down the slope, lay a short distance away on top of sprouting wildflowers. He tried to explain the civil war, saying, ‘I want you to remember more about this place than your silly dolls and your dress-up games and books.’ He gestured toward the ridge. ‘People are buried there, Pia. In shallow graves with no markers. Your new friend? His father is buried there too.’

  Pia remembers studying the scrub that grew over the unmarked graves her father had indicated. She took in the flicking heads of the marigolds and waited, as when her father said prayers at dinner, for a signal that the solemn moment had passed. She hadn’t understood—graves did not look like this, and the traffic of human history, its misery had never been her concern…so a part of her dismissed what he’d said, even as another part stored the memory. Eventually he lit a cigarette and they started back down the mountain, the crickets chirring in the grass, a lizard skittering across the path between them.

  PIA WORKS HER WAY back down the trail to the beach. The rain has now turned to drizzle—a light spray, as if the wind is lifting a thin skein of water off the surf. There are fewer whitecaps coming into the bay, less rolling thunder, though farther out on the water the waves are still sizable—washing up against the prow of the trawler that is moving slowly past the bluff. The gulls are back circling the bay and shrugging around the flotsam that’s washed up on the sand.

  The dog trots over to Pia when she steps off the rocks, soaking wet and happy in his greeting. He sniffs the base of the box she’s carrying and then ambles back to the farmer, casting a look over his shoulder to be sure she’s following along with the food. More debris has been dragged up toward the cliff face: another dozen planks of wood, an oar, six life vests, a clump of waterlogged clothes that makes Pia picture a suitcase being blown open in a storm. But when she walks closer to the mound, she sees how ragged the clothes are and it occurs to her that these things were probably torn off the bodies they belonged to, in the churning water. A grey sweater; a blue blouse torn at the shoulder; a pair of navy trousers that would fit a child.

  Pia turns away and takes the box of sandwiches, the canister of tea and its cups, over to the group who’ve gathered near the cliff face. The barman has come down from the hotel with a map of the coast, and he and the fisherman are consulting about the tides. There are a few bays north and south along the coastline where something that might help to identify the ship could wash up. Everyone finishes their sandwiches, stacking the teacups back in the box politely, delicately. The postmistress yawns. Even the dog is flagging: he flops down in the windbreak the stack of wood planks has made, his head between his paws. Pia picks up the box and turns toward the foot of the trail; the gulls along the tide line squawk loudly as she approaches. The builder—his face pinched with cold—trudges up from the shore. There are traces of salt around his eyes and mouth from the hour he’s spent on the point.